So, why a kayak?

It was about this time two years ago that my good pal Nobby and I were trudging back to our cars along the Dorset coast somewhere between Kimmeridge and Worbarrow Bay after a fruitless attempt for an early season bass. We tried to reason that maybe we were using the wrong tactics, the sea and weather conditions weren’t right and made countless other excuses for our poor early season form.

“I reckon we should get kayaks” were the words that Nobby blurted out.

“What?” I said.

“You know, fishing kayaks, I’ve seen a few of them around” he replied enthusiastically.

I pondered it for a few seconds and concluded,

“That’s actually not a bad shout my friend!”

And so it began… not immediately but make no mistake the seed had been sown and the beginnings of a plan were hatched. It was finally executed early in 2009.

It wasn’t that we weren’t enjoying our shore fishing it was just the catch rates were relatively modest plus we’d already found ourselves doing less and less traditional beach fishing with big rods, reels and a mountain of tackle and concentrating our efforts on light gear, lures and fishing on the move. Even this was hit and miss though and once the wheel was set in motion the idea of kayak fishing became increasingly appealing to get us to inshore waters inaccessible on foot and to allow us to fish in deeper water a little further out.

We toyed with the idea of getting a boat between us and even looked at a couple but neither of us was particularly blown away with what was on offer for our budget, nor did we really have the space at the time to keep it or the time to maintain it properly.

We both liked the idea of being able to throw a kayak on the roof of our cars and head off to wherever the will would take us…… little did we know then that with the combined cost of kitting out the yaks we could probably have bought a semi-decent boat and had change in our pockets but as is said “what’s done is done!”. However, even in retrospect I wouldn’t change that decision – I like the freedom you have with a kayak to take it virtually anywhere you please, launch from a beach and even get to those fishing spots you just couldn’t get to sensibly even with the smallest of boats.

Once we’d made up our minds it was an option we were committed too, the next stage was research and to explore the kayak options available to us on the market…… that will be the subject of my next post.